Thread: Mexicans flee Tijuana for U.S.

Please remain calm when you read this.

Dixie

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/ ... Haven.html

Tuesday, January 9, 2007 · Last updated 11:28 a.m. PT

Mexicans flee Tijuana for U.S.

By ELLIOT SPAGAT
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

CHULA VISTA, Calif. -- A border city that has long watched illegal immigrants pass through on their way to low-wage jobs up north is increasingly welcoming a very different kind of arrival: wealthy Mexicans seeking refuge from kidnappings and other violence.

Francisco Villegas Peralta is among the new residents of Chula Vista, where new boulevards run past gated communities and trendy malls.

He said he knew he had to get out of Tijuana, Mexico, one July morning when three SUVs trailed him from his house through Tijuana's streets. He escaped, and moved soon after with his wife and three children to a one-story house in one of this city's more modest neighborhoods.

"I feel a sense of relief as soon as I cross the border," his wife, Lorena Flores, said in the living room of their sparsely furnished home, which the couple bought for $585,000. She rarely visits Tijuana; Villegas drives there daily to check on his five restaurants.

The lawlessness along the border prompted Mexico's new president to send troops to disarm local police in Tijuana last week. Some officers are suspected of being in cahoots with drug smugglers.

Villegas, who heads the Tijuana chapter of Mexico's restaurant association, has counted about 200 people - and that's just among restaurateurs and their families - who have left the border city of 1.3 million in the past two years.


A drive through Chula Vista shows that Villegas has plenty of company.

A Starbucks-style Mexican coffee chain with about 40 stores in Tijuana opened its first U.S. store here in November. A private elementary school that caters to Mexicans filled up six months before classes began.

The city has nearly doubled to 230,000 people since 1990 as new housing tracts have sprung up on the plains and rolling hills beyond Chula Vista's aging downtown. City Hall is sandwiched between San Diego's skyscrapers and the Mexican border, eight miles in either direction.

The well-to-do newcomers cross the border legally, using green cards, investor visas or temporary permits for shopping trips or other short visits.

Juan Jose Plascencia, whose family owns upscale Tijuana restaurants, moved to Chula Vista two years ago and opened his first U.S. restaurant in May.

"People feel at home here," said Plascencia, ticking off the names of other new restaurants whose owners have left Tijuana. "First, people rent. If they like it, they buy."

Kidnappings-for-ransom in the last year or two appear to have fueled the northward push.

Josie Ortiz, a real estate broker who works in Chula Vista, sold about 20 homes last year to Tijuana residents, up from about 10 in previous years. One was a food distributor who moved here after a Mexican police investigator said his name appeared on a kidnapper's list of potential targets. Another was a Tijuana restaurant owner who got a call from a stranger who said, "We're after you."

One homemaker, who asked not to be identified because she fears for her safety, said she moved to Chula Vista last month with her husband and 4-month-old girl after two friends were taken from their home as they prepared for work one morning. They were released within two months after paying ransom.

"If you live and work in Tijuana, the kidnappers will study you, see your patterns, try to figure out your routine," said Jorge Ahuage, another broker who caters to wealthy Mexicans seeking U.S. homes.

Last week, Mexican President Felipe Calderon sent 3,300 soldiers and federal police to Tijuana to hunt down drug gangs. The soldiers swept police stations and took officers' guns for inspection amid allegations by federal investigators that a corrupt network of officers supports smugglers who bring drugs into the U.S.

Villegas, whose father settled in Tijuana in 1952 as a dishwasher, still owns a home there and hopes to return.

"Tijuana is going to change," said Villegas, 45. "It cannot continue in the grip of criminals."

But he is also installing new wood floors in his Chula Vista living room and making plans to put grass next to his backyard swimming pool. In March, he plans to open a restaurant - his first in the U.S.

The wealthy illegal aliens can move to some place in Mexico!! They don't have to come to the US.

Dixie

Just when I thought Mexico couldn't get any crappier.......

Now even the working ones have to leave!

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascit ... 343976.htm

Posted on Fri, Dec. 29, 2006email thisprint this
In Mexico, kidnapping risk weighs on privileged
By Carol Rosenberg

McClatchy Newspapers

(MCT)

MEXICO CITY - A rail-thin 30-something mother in blue jeans cradles her baby in her arms while shopping for Christmas toys in a posh department store - shadowed by a bodyguard with suit, tie and earphone, tending the baby's stroller.

Elsewhere in the city, another mother has hired a department store Santa for nochebuena, Christmas Eve. The tab - $100 - spares dad and the driver the duty of donning the costume. "To see their smiles," she says, beaming at her toddlers, "I'd pay anything."

Or consider the Maymon sisters. Among Mexico's best girl golfers, they go to a proper private school, have skied Vail, Colo., and spent weekends on the finest greens in the Americas.

"It's fun. You make great friends," says Maria, 13, who with Giovana, 11, has competed at the Publix Junior Golf Classic in Doral, Fla.

Peek behind the walls and into the gated communities of the nation's elite, here in Mexico City, and their children lead a rarefied life of exclusive schools and gloriously manicured country clubs, weekend homes and far-flung travel.

This is a nation where 11 percent of the population control 88 percent of its wealth, according to Mexico's National Institute of Statistics.

And the children inside that world have lives of prosperity and promise: Served by nannies and chauffeurs. Cruising shopping malls with drivers doubling as bodyguards. Crashing club scenes, or party hopping in private homes.

But for the omnipresent specter of kidnapping, they lead Latin America's version of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous - an affluent, cloistered existence unimaginable to a malnourished infant in Guatemala, boys who pick through a garbage dump in Honduras, live on the streets of Argentina or in an orphanage in Haiti.

Multilingual education for these children is de rigueur.

With a driver to ferry kids, after-school hours are filled with special programs, in private places: dance class, swimming, chess, even Pilates for Kids in exclusive gyms with specially shrunk exercise equipment.

"A park? What's a park? Do they even exist in Mexico?" cracks 16-year-old Jimena after taking her horse Chito through the paces at secluded stables in a pastoral pocket of this sprawling metropolis of about 18 million.

She has been riding since age 8 - and wants to be a neurologist when she grows up.

Meantime, life mostly revolves around private school, riding five times weekly, high-end shopping malls and house parties. Jimena hosted one that drew 600 kids, coming and going - an estimate her mother Rosario confirms, with a nod.

Theirs is a cosmopolitan existence: plans to study abroad at a university, designer labels, studying with a friend at Starbucks, where the price tag for two double espressos equals the daily minimum wage.

But for the wealthy across this city and in other posh pockets of Latin America, raising their rich kids also requires a level of security that, critics argue, spawns a life of isolation and alienation - cut off from swaths of their own culture, watching too much TV, in the care of nannies.

"They don't go to the park. They don't go out. They order in and the maids bring to their rooms. I think it is a lost generation," declares Guadalupe Loaeza, a writer and intellectual who has for years ruffled elite sensibilities.

Cut off from poorer pockets of society, she says, affluent Mexican children "live in a golden cage, they live in a prison," Loaeza says.

"They don't understand the world where they are living."

Now, she says, she has detected spiraling eating disorders and even younger drug abuse among the elites, a sign, she says, of their social alienation.

It all comes down to security in a nation where wealthy parents see the No. 1 threat to their child as kidnap and ransom - not a broken leg on the ski slopes, nor being hit by a car crossing the road without looking both ways.

So much so that time and again wealthy executives and other Mexicans of privilege turned down The Miami Herald request to document their children's lavish lifestyles.

"Why expose your children to the press?" says David Robillard, director of the Mexico City office of the Kroll Inc. risk assessing security consultants. "You're only allowing a kidnapper to profile them."

Which is why, in this age of the Internet and Web-profiling, with rare exception, The Miami Herald is identifying wealthy children and their parents in this article by their first names, omitting their neighborhoods and school names and the locations of their hangouts in exchange for conversations about their affluent lifestyles.

"I'm not really worried about it - but my parents are," says Diego, 19, son of an insurance executive, as he hung out with other teens after school at a McDonald's frequented by the kids from a posh Catholic school.

One of his friends was kidnapped two months ago, he said, held for two weeks, and then freed for a sum of cash he does not know. His uncle, he said, was held for 12 hours and released for "big money," he said.

"It's like an express kidnapping," he adds, softly.

Even before these episodes, he said, he had to call his mom by cellphone four to five times a day, each time he drives from one place to another. Once home for the night, he says, he shows himself to his mother - a ritual that will likely continue until he goes to university, in Canada.

Adds Claudia, 44, whose three kids shuttle between a private Jewish school, sports and exclusive riding stables where her 14-year-old daughter Orly trains five times a week on her mare, Luna:

"We are the lucky part of Mexico, very lucky. We can't complain at all. I think every day, every week about how lucky I am - with healthy kids and private schools. We can give them a good education. We have a car."

Actually, three cars - one for her, one for her husband and one for a son.

Yet, her children "don't know what it means to be independent. They live in a small bubble, very protected," she said. "We don't let them go out by themselves. You have to know all the time where your husband and your kids are."

It is at the riding lessons where her daughter mixes with other girls from different private schools, and different communities, a break from their insular society.

But it isn't cheap. Maintaining a child's passion for her horse, she says, "is like sending a dumb child to Harvard."

Latin America's elite have never been shy about showing off their wealth, and it is fully on display on a Friday evening in a mall in a wealthy northern suburb, where kids in Italian leather loafers, hip-hugging tatty jeans and designer tops cruise the concourse.

Each and every one appears to be carrying a sleek, cutting-edge cellphone, ringing each other across the food court - their drivers and bodyguards arrayed an escalator ride above them in business attire, watching their wards weaving through crowds, giggling at the Clinique counter, getting a snack.

You will see no photos of those guards with this article.

Little more than a minute into our visit, a uniformed security guard alerted by a walkie-talkie earphone appears at a Miami Herald photographer's elbow and declares photos of the security detail strictly off-limits.

Some kids consider their security guards an embarrassment.

Some see them as status symbols.

But, for many, they are a fact of life, another servant, an accessory to bring along with your cellphone when heading out the door.

Says a 15-year-old boy in an Abercrombie bomber jacket over his uniform, while sneaking a cigarette outside an exclusive school run by Irish-Catholic priests in one of Mexico City's wealthiest suburbs: "Everybody has a driver with a gun. But the really rich kids have bodyguards, too."

Another ploy for Aztlan...then look for pity. They need to go south, east or west. Maybe the US can donate some signs. Maybe they are getting lost. These people can afford homes costing almost $600,000?!

These people are damned cowards.

They flee their country because it sucks and then come to my country and refuse to assimilate.

If they love Mexico so much, they need to make their own nation a place worth living instead of fleeing over the border.

If this guy has $585,000 to buy a house, then he has money to arm himself, and to work with others of similar means to form a self-defense organization.